backstairs gossip

The anecdotes and backstairs gossip tee us up for the penultimate chapter "The Televised Future," featuring Hewitt's controversial and admittedly "radical" proposal that all three networks drop their dinner hour evening news programs in favor of one pooled effort carried by all of them.

You're surrounded by smart- suited spin-doctors, backstairs gossips and political window-dressers.

He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse." But in The Silent Woman she disdains not merely journalism but biography and history as well, even writing itself: "The writer, like the murderer, needs a motive." We're all of us backstairs gossips and readers of other people's mail; "intrusive" "scoundrels," "transgressive" "burglars" and "poisonous" birds of prey; "virulent new strains of the bacillus of bad faith."